At the end of October 2012, Sony will be removing Life with PlayStation and [email protected] from the PS3 with a software update. You will still be able to participate on your computer, however. Please see the article at the link below for more information.

[email protected] is a distributed computing project. It uses your computer/PS3 to simulate the way proteins fold. Many diseases (like Alzheimer's) are caused by proteins folding incorrectly. This project tries to learn more about the way proteins fold, which hopefully might lead to a cure of these diseases.

The simulations are so complex, originally only supercomputers did them. But as computers became more mainstream, Stanford decided to divide the workload amongst millions of regular people running regular computers. They figured that millions of [weaker] computers doing a fraction of the work would equal a few supercomputers.

Where does the team come into this?
Individuals are rewarded points for work unit (a partial simulation) he or she completes. A team essentially just a bunch of individuals put together.

Internet Explorer may not show the spoiler tags properly.
Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome are known to work correctly.

Joining Instructions

As [email protected] is being discontinued on the PS3 as per above, the instructions below are for reference and for those who have elected not to update their system(s).

1. First, you must be on the [email protected] Channel within Life with PlayStation. After opening Life with PlayStation, hold square and hit down on the d-pad.2. Hit Triangle.3. Select "Current Channel".

4. Select "Identity"

5. Choose "Join an Existing Team"

6. Enter "54376" (without the quotes).

7. Now, in the "Identity" menu, you can also create a donor name if you wish (like a [email protected] user ID).

Team Members

Below are the PS3Forums.com IDs of those that are a part of the team. Send me a PM if you want to be placed on the list. If your username for [email protected] is different than your PS3Forums ID, please send me a PM, and I will place it in brackets next to your PS3Forums ID in the list below. In other words, I do not need your PSN ID. Instead, what I need is your [email protected] name ONLY if it is different from your PS3Forums ID. This way, people can track you on our [email protected] team site.

In summary, any client program (i.e. PS3/Computer) can contribute to the statistics for our team by putting the number '54376' in the team field. Your stats will NOT be attributed to the team by just signing up here. You MUST put in this number in order to get your stats tracked. In essence, then, the purpose of signing up here is so that we have an idea of what members of the forums are actually contributing. I repeat, signing up here but not putting in the number is essentially useless.

System Statistics menu has been added. You can view how many WUs you have downloaded, uploaded, timed-out, and are waiting to upload. ([email protected] Channel > Triangle > Current Channel > Information > System Statistics).

If you’ve ever wished you could find everything you need to start your day on your PLAYSTATION 3, Life with PlayStation give you one more reason to do so. This free service delivers a new way for you to utilize your PS3 to instantly access real-time news and information like weather updates from over 60 cities around the world.

Life with PlayStation provides a stunning interactive globe, a 3D world map that you can twirl around to see live cloud movement courtesy of the University of Wisconsin, combined with up-to-date weather information from the Weather Channel, top news headlines provided by Google news, and live web cam images via the Earth Television Network — all localized to the select city. And why not have your favorite soundtrack playing in the background while you go through your morning ritual (just think, no TV commercials and teasers to find out if you need to bring an umbrella to work)? You’re on your own for your morning caffeine fix.

For those following the progress of Hurricane Ike throughout last week, we were able to track the storm’s real-time movement from Life with PlayStation. (See the screenshots below)

We’re also really excited to share that this new lifestyle service is running in parallel with our [email protected] project. Essentially, this means that while you’re taking a stroll on Life with PlayStation, you’re automatically helping Stanford University to work towards curing diseases such as Alzheimer’s and various types of cancers. For those familiar with [email protected], we’ve made some enhancements for more advanced simulations of protein folding and support for wider variety of simulations, in addition to adding a unique ranking system showcasing top contributors from around the world.

Life with PlayStation is now available for download by selecting the [email protected] icon under “Network” on the XMB. Give it a whirl, we look forward to reading your feedback.

Yes! You can fold on your computer as well by downloading the proper application found HERE. When you first run the the program, it will ask you for your team number and your username. Choose any name you swish (You can't use spaces in your name, just underscores "_"), and then enter 54376 in the box where it asks for team number.

Below are links to partially completed sigs which you can edit for yourself. I repeat, they will need to be edited in order to comply with the forum's sig rules unlike the ones above:ONETWOTHREEFOURFIVESIXSEVEN

Version 1.31: "Operations for handling network errors related to the uploading and downloading of work units have been improved."
- Thanks LiquidHelium.

Version 1.3 Available

Version 1.3 is out now, and here is a little bit about it from the PS Blog. (Please note that if you listen to music while folding, each WU will take about 30 minutes longer to complete. Also, I find that the auto-shutdown option is a VERY useful feature.)New [email protected] Features Coming

If you happen to be one of the people that wants to leave their machine running after they finished their late-night gaming session, but wish to shut it down after a limited period of time, we have a great tip for you:

Go to Settings menu, select Automatic Shutdown and then After Current. You will see a little clock appearing on the top right hand corner of the screen. When this clock reaches zero, the machine will power off completely so you can sleep quietly through the night. In this option the machine will power off after sending the data back to Stanford University so your contribution to the project is maximized.

You may also choose to shut down after a limited period of time (for example, 3 or 4 hours). To do that choose the Automatic Shutdown option and click on the “In 01h:00m” timer. You will now be able to change the timer settings. After rotating the timer to a new time, you should now see your selected timer appear at the top right corner of the screen. This timer will count all the way down to 0 and then power off the system.

To disable active timer at any time, go to Settings, choose Automatic Shutdown and then Disable.

What’s a better Holiday addition to Folding than playing music? We’ve added a great feature in this version in the form of a background music player:

To activate the music player select Music and then a channel. The channels are automatically populated with songs you have stored on your Hard Disk Drive! For holiday music I prefer to choose Dramatic (yeah!) and voila - music is playing.

If you wish to skip to another track, just use a combination of X + left or right arrow. You can also change the channel by choosing X + up or down arrow. Happy listening!

To stop music from playing, select Music again from the main menu and choose “disable.”

Your music playback selection will be saved between consecutive runs of Folding[email protected]

We hope that these enhancements help improve your FAH experience. The response from PS3 owners really has been spectacular, and thanks to you, the most powerful distributed computer network in the world continues to grow.

Thanks Lionel! I appreciate you setting up the PS3 Forums team! As soon as I download the firmware update next week and get [email protected] on my PS3, I'll be sure to enter the team # and start contributing.

all you have to do is put that team number in the settings...and we'll be apart of the team. Theres no need to sign up, you could even put your pc on that team

Yeah, I got my PC on the team. Unfortunately, it hasn't updated yet. Does anyone know how long it takes until they put you on the team? I'm guessing that it's until you finish a unit - my personal page says no active processors, so I assume that when my individual is updated, so will the team one. Has anyone else tried to join yet?

lol, unfortunately, my PC's are with another team, but it doesnt mean that I wont switch over when things get started.

also... ahaah, we're gonna need a lot of ps3 users to sign up for this to have our ranking move up, cause look at the officials, thats a lot of bandwidth that some teams have output.

hopefully, ps3 can spit info out faster, so we have more tasks and give us an advantage

Are you kidding me? I have a pretty sick custom built rig (intel 975x Mobo/ Intel Core 2 Duo 6700/ 2gb Corsair DDR2 1000/ ATi X1950), and from what I've seen the PS3 punishes my PC in computational prowess (maybe the PPU is about the same in general purpose stuff like burning cd's and scanning for viruses). The Cell is approximately 80x faster than the new Intel Woodcrest (Core 2 Xeon) in number crunching, which is Intel's creme de la creme server chip...thats pretty ****ing sick, How bout them apples, huh Intel and AMD?

But I guess a fair comparison would require Intel and AMD to make a more specialised 8 core processor, because 2 and 4 general purpose cores can't crunch numbers like the Cell. I am gonna go out on the limb and say that 1 PS3 can fold comparably to 2-3 top end PC's w/out breaking a sweat.

Are you kidding me? I have a pretty sick custom built rig (intel 975x Mobo/ Intel Core 2 Duo 6700/ 2gb Corsair DDR21000/ ATi X1950), and from what I've seen the PS3 punishes my PC in computational prowess (maybe the PPU is about the same in general purpose stuff like burning cd's and scanning for viruses). The Cell is approximately 80x faster than the new Intel Woodcrest (Core 2 Xeon) in number crunching, which is Intel's creme de la creme server chip...thats pretty ****ing sick, How bout them apples, huh Intel and AMD?

But I guess a fair comparison would require Intel and AMD to make a more specialised 8 core processor, because 2 and 4 general purpose cores can't crunch numbers like the Cell.

I put my PC together, but it's not that great. I don't play games on it though so it's pretty good for what I use it for:

Are you kidding me? I have a pretty sick custom built rig (intel 975x Mobo/ Intel Core 2 Duo 6700/ 2gb Corsair DDR2 1000/ ATi X1950), and from what I've seen the PS3 punishes my PC in computational prowess (maybe the PPU is about the same in general purpose stuff like burning cd's and scanning for viruses). The Cell is approximately 80x faster than the new Intel Woodcrest (Core 2 Xeon) in number crunching, which is Intel's creme de la creme server chip...thats pretty ****ing sick, How bout them apples, huh Intel and AMD?

But I guess a fair comparison would require Intel and AMD to make a more specialised 8 core processor, because 2 and 4 general purpose cores can't crunch numbers like the Cell. I am gonna go out on the limb and say that 1 PS3 can fold comparably to 2-3 top end PC's

I have [email protected] on my pc atm and i have put the team on there but it won't do much. My computer is just about outdated with only 126mb RAM